Moblin Brings Btrfs into View, Eschews Ext4

The recently released version 2.0 of Moblin elicited significant feedback. One frequently posed question was, why not ext4?

Even though Moblin includes Kernel 2.6.30 that supports the ext4 filesystem, so far Moblin has set ext3 as the default. In an answer to a query on the Moblin developer mailing list, kernel developer Arjan van de Ven made known that ext4 support was not in the current plans for the root filesystem and that "we're seriously looking at btrfs right now, the next generation Linux filesystem."

Arjan's announcement leads to serious speculation that btrfs will become Moblin's rootfs because of features such as snapshots to restore to factory default. Performance is another asset, plus the fact that btrfs is being considered a possible successor to zfs for Linux in general. If and when btrfs comes to Moblin depends on the results of further testing.

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